


Sugar and Spice

by deskclutter



Category: The Sandman
Genre: Gen, Spoilers for A Game of You, angst buckets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-22
Updated: 2010-06-22
Packaged: 2017-10-10 05:35:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/96159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deskclutter/pseuds/deskclutter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dream is sad, the Dreaming cries, and Death pops over to see what is up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sugar and Spice

  
"Hey," she said, appearing at his side. He hadn't called her, and she hadn't announced her arrival, but here she was anyway. "Are you okay?"

He turned his head to glance at her before looking at the rain through the throne room window. It poured down in sheets and sheets, teardrops by the millions as the Dreaming reflects its master's mood, a large-scale rendition of a Neverland bowing to its Peter.

"I see," she sighed.

"Do not presume—"

"I don't," she said, cutting him off. He knew she didn't.

They stood there, in the shadow of the raindrops tapping against the panes of the wide, wide glass like the fingers of a nervous old schoolteacher she met yesterday afternoon. _But I haven't had my tea,_ the schoolteacher had said anxiously.

_You don't have to worry about that anymore, or about the medicine in the upper right-hand drawer in the kitchen——not the left, or about feeding your cat tonight,_ she had told him with a smile.

_But I haven't had my tea,_ he had quavered.

_No, you haven't,_ she had said as he began to disappear. In a few days time, she will have to return for the cat when it finally grows weary of rubbish bins after its old pampered lifestyle, and she will be there to guide it through to the next part of the journey.

"My sister," he said.

For a moment she thought he was the schoolteacher, then she came back to herself and looked up at him. "What's up?"

He looked mildly bemused, so she clarified. "What is it?"

"Why?" he asked. There's a world of meaning in that question.

She couldn't answer all of it, so she went for the obvious. "Because," she answered. "You're an honourable man, and a proper man, but you're not _nice_. You're like a gingerbread man, little brother, made of vanilla and sugar and cinnamon and ginger. They should know that you're made of _all_ of those, but when you eat gingerbread, you think about how sweet it is, how the taste lingers in your mouth with the sweet stickiness of it wrapped in the hollows of your teeth, and you _forget_ that cinnamon and ginger are still spices."

Lightning snapped across the Dreaming. She frowned at him.

"I apologise," he murmured, effectively chastised. The rain resumed its normal patter. "…Thank you, my sister," he added softly.

"No problem," she told him, waving it off. "Will you talk to her?"

"We have said all that needs to be spoken," he said, bowing his head. She looked at him, and she saw her exasperatingly stubborn, irritatingly superior younger brother looking as dejected as he ever could.

Stubbornness is a family trait. "No, you haven't, because you wouldn't be angsting over here if you had." She placed her hands on her hips to glare at him in worry, a study in black, pale and a half-mixed blend of frustration and concern.

"My sister," he said, in a tone that brooked no argument, as implacable as stone. "There remains nothing whatsoever about which she and I may speak."

"That bad?" she asked him softly.

He stared inscrutably at her for one long moment, then closed his eyes, head erect, shoulders stiff with pride, or dignity, or pain, or maybe just because he wanted to. "…Yes."

There was a world full of things left to talk about, not the least of which was the skerry, and she knew it. But it wasn't her place or her function to push him that far. She was his sister, not his mother, and all she could do was…be there, even while he ran away. She could shield him, and she could help him when he let her, but sooner or later, he would have to face real life, and when he did a fox might come along and _snap_! And that'd be that.

No story truly ends at happily ever after. She can't deal with doing that a second time, especially not if it were for this brother of hers, who's the closest thing to her second half, a peek into a life that might have been hers if she hadn't changed—not for the better but for the _different_.

In her own way, she suspected she was as broken as he was.

"Dream." She touched his arm, and he opened his eyes to look down at her. "I can't stay any longer, I have duties to fulfil. Call me if you need me, okay?"

"As you wish," he said, starlight flashing in his eye.

She left him there, with the Dreaming shattering its millions of loosed drops upon the ground and the water around the shores and between the skerries. The sun was shining behind the clouds, she knew. Structure and rules were important, here in the Dreaming, and it was morning, even as the dark and the wet spattered the land.  



End file.
